Since ancient times humanity has recognized
an intimate relationship between the spine and health. Spinal care and
manipulation has been practiced for thousands of years in nearly all
parts
of the world. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates, called the “Father of
Medicine”,
was really a natural healer, stressing diet, exercise, natural
remedies,
and spinal adjustments as a means of curing diseases and maintaining
health.
As he said: “One or more vertebrae of the spine may…go out of
place…they
are likely to produce serious complications and even death, if not
properly
adjusted.”

Chiropractic as a science was
founded in 1895
by Canadian Daniel David (D.D.) Palmer of Port Perry, Ontario who moved
to Davenport, Iowa, the “home of Chiropractic”. He was a successful
practitioner
of magnetic healing, a popular form of natural health care in the
United
States, based on the premise that disease was the result of an
imbalance
in a person’s natural energies. During his practices, he noticed spinal
misalignments in his patients and started to try to correct them by
hand
through manipulation. It was then he started to see a closer
relationship
between the spine and our health. He theorized that a misaligned
vertebrae
interfered with the function of the spinal nerves, thereby blocking the
patient’s natural healing ability. Palmer then named his new “hand
treatments."
He took the Greek word for “hand”, cheir, and “done by”, praktos, and
put
them together. Chiropractic was thus born. Palmer began to research and
refine the art, science, and philosophy of this new healing system, and
founded the first and what is now the Palmer College of Chiropractic.
D.D.
was known as the “Discoverer,” while his son, Bartlett Joshua (B.J.),
who
succeeded him in leadership of the fledgling profession, became known
as
the “Developer” of chiropractic.

D.D. Palmer

B.J. Palmer

“We Chiropractors
work with the sciences
of the universe by turning on the life in man through the art of
adjustment.
We do not prescribe, treat or diagnose conditions. We use only our
hands.
We work with the subtle substance of the soul. We release the prisoned
impulse, the tiny rivulet of force, that emanates from the mind and
flows
over the nerves to the cells, and stirs them into life. We deal with
the
magic power that transforms a common food into living, loving, thinking
clay; that robes the earth with beauty, and hues and scents the flowers
with the glory of the air. In the dim, dark, distant long ago, when the
sun first bowed to the morning star, this power spoke and there was
life;
it quickened the slime of the sea and the dust of the earth and drove
the
cell to union with its fellows in countless living forms. Through aeons
of time it finned the fish and winged the bird and fanged the beast.
Endlessly
it worked, evolving its form until it produced the crowning glory of
them
all.

With tireless energy it
blows the bubble
of each individual life and then silently, relentlessly dissolves the
form,
and absorbs the spirit into itself again….And yet you ask, “Can
Chiropractic
cure appendicitis or the flu?” …Have you more faith in a knife of a
spoonful
of medicine than in the power that animates the living world?”